When I was a child, back in the late 1970s and early 1980s,  growing up on a council estate in Rotherham in South Yorkshire, I remember that my friends and I used to play all sorts of games in some rather dangerous places.

One of my particular memories is of us running wild on a building site when the estate was being expanded – no security fences in those days of course – those golden days of yesteryear when we didn’t  feel it was necessary to keep the estate kids safely away from the piles of bricks, rickety scaffolding, rusting machinery and half completed buildings.

One of the games we loved playing involved finding a huge  heap of sand or half completed wall – anything we could climb up on. The first one to the top of the heap or wall would claim the kingdom and shout, “I’m king of the castle and you’re the dirty rascal.” The rest of us would charge the kingdom. Some tried pulling the king down. Others tried pushing the king off the castle. We all wanted to take over the kingdom.

Each attack on the king was in some way an unspoken demand for proof. “If you’re really the king, prove it. Defend yourself. Show us your power and strength. Save yourself and your kingdom. Because if you don’t I’ll take it for myself.” Each one of us wanted to climb the heap of sand and proclaim that we were king (or queen of course) of all that we surveyed!

It was a great game. We had a lot of fun and I’m sure many of you played very similar games, if not the same!

But when we look back and reflect on how we played, I wonder if it did begin to nurture in us an outlook that has become a bit of a problem.

You see from being children we have grown up – but many of us have never stopped playing the game. We have become adults and ‘King of the Castle’ has become a way of life.

Our heaps of sand or half built walls, our high places are now made up of our personal success and money, power and control or reputation and popularity.

For some of us, the heaps of sand have become our families, our children, or the fairy tale of living happily ever after. Others have climbed the walls of being right, holy, or respectable.

Often our kingdoms have become ways of thinking, political parties, or social groups. Our nation and even our church have become king of the castle playgrounds.

There are all sorts of kingdoms. Each one of us can probably name the sand heaps of our lives, the sand heaps on which we have played king or queen of the castle.

The adult version of king of the castle has become about filling our emptiness, fighting our fear, and ultimately establishing some type of order and control.

What began as a child’s game has become the reality of our adult lives.

For many of us life is a constant scrambling to establish and maintain our little kingdoms, to convince ourselves as much as anyone else that we are okay, we are enough, we are the king or queen. And isn’t that a hard way to live?

Today, the Feast of Christ the King, celebrates and reminds us that playing king of the castle does not have to be the final reality of our lives.

Life can be different. We do not have to spend our lives trying to get to the top of a three-foot heap of sand. We do not have to spend our lives trying to keep our balance on top of a half-built wall as others try to push us off.

Christ the King invites us to stop playing the game. Life does not have to be, was never intended to be, an ongoing game of king of the castle.

If we choose to stop playing the game, it means we must give up our little kingdoms. We cannot celebrate Christ the King if we continue fighting our way up the sand heap.

We can have one or the other but not both.

Today in our service we will again pray, “your kingdom come.” It rolls off our tongues with ease and familiarity.  But I wonder if we really know what we’re asking for and do we really mean it? Implicit in that prayer is the request, “my kingdom go.” “Your kingdom come, my kingdom go.”

It’s one thing to pray for God’s kingdom to come. It’s another to let our kingdom go. After all we’ve been kings and queens of our own castles for a long time. Or at least we’ve convinced ourselves that we have.

It’s not easy to let go of our kingdoms and more often than not I think we try to negotiate a deal with God. “Ok God. Prove you are the king and then I’ll step down. Show me evidence of your kingdom and then I’ll let go of mine.”

The leaders, the soldiers, one of the criminals – they all want the same thing. They want to see proof that Christ is the king. They want to see evidence of his kingdom. We all do. After all, if Jesus is really the king, the one to rule our lives, and we are supposed to believe that – then let him prove it. “Save yourself if you are the Messiah of God. Save yourself if you are the King of the Jews. Aren’t you the Messiah? Then prove it. Save yourself and me.”

At one level I think we want to see Jesus come down from the cross. We want to see his wounds disappear. We want to see a well-dressed king – one with physical strength, military might, and political power. We want to see something spectacular, something beyond the realities of our ordinary lives.

At a much deeper level, however, these demands are about more than just Jesus saving himself from death, from physical pain, from political defeat.  At this deeper level we are crying out: “Save yourself and us from our own unbelief. Save yourself and us from our need to control. Save yourself and us from the fear that this little heap of sand I call my kingdom is all that there is to my life. Show me. Right now. Prove who you are.”

But you know what – he won’t do it – at least not in the way we usually want. Jesus will not offer us proof of his kingship. Instead he offers us the kingdom. He invites us to share in his kingship.

That happens in the silence of the deepest love.

The leaders are scoffing at Jesus. He responds with silence. The soldiers are mocking him. He responds with silence. One of the criminals derides him. He responds with silence. All are demanding proof. None are getting what they ask for. Jesus does not take himself or the criminals off the cross. He doesn’t answer the leaders. He refuses to respond to the soldiers. He is silent.

In that silence the other criminal begins to understand. It’s not about getting proof of Christ’s kingship – it’s about letting go of our own kingship. It’s about coming down from our little heaps of sand and realising that we already are, and always have been, royal members of God’s holy kingdom.

This realisation underlies the criminal’s cry, “Jesus remember me. Remember me not because of what I have done or left undone. Remember me in spite of those things. Remember me not because of who I am, but because of who you are.” His cry to be remembered is the cry of one who has emptied himself of everything, has let go of every last kingdom, and whose very life and existence are entrusted to the God who remembers. That is the reign of Christ.

The reign of Christ does not mean we now have all the answers, that everything is fixed, that there is no more pain, or that every problem has been eliminated. Jesus will not take us off our crosses. Instead, he gets up there with us. He does not fix our lives. Instead, he enters into the reality of our ordinary existence. We are remembered – and right here today, in the reality of our everyday lives, in the midst of our pain, in the midst of our dying, in the midst of our brokenness, in the midst of our guilt – Christ the King says to us, “Truly, I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

Who was Margaret of Scotland? I wonder what you already know about her – or what you think you know about her?

It’s strange to start at the end, but Margaret died on 16^th November in the year 1093 and that’s the reason that her feast day is on this day.

She’s not one of particularly well-known saints, especially outside of Scotland and many people don’t have any idea about who she was or what she did, but as we learn about her today and we get to know her story better, I’m sure most of us will come to admire her, and maybe even see her as a role model for ourselves and for our lives as followers of Jesus.

So let’s take a brief look at her life. Margaret was the granddaughter of the English king Edmund Ironside, but because of dynastic disputes she was born in Hungary, in the year 1047. She had one brother, Edgar, and a sister, Christian, and many people in England saw her father Edward Ætheling as the rightful heir to the throne of England. Those of you who know your history  will confirm that Edward the Confessor became King of England in 1042, but that he never had children, and in 1054 the parliament of Anglo-Saxon England decided to bring Margaret’s family back from Hungary so that her father could inherit the throne when King Edward died. So, the three siblings were brought up at the Anglo-Saxon court under the supervision of Benedictine monks and nuns, who trained them according to the Benedictine ideal of a life of work and prayer.

It’s hard to overstate the influence of those Benedictines in Margaret’s life. From them she learned the importance of balancing times of prayer and times of working for the good of others.

Margaret’s father died in 1057, and her brother Edgar became heir to the throne. But his succession was not to be – King Edward the Confessor died in 1066, and we all know what happened in that year? Of course, William the Conqueror invaded England and claimed the throne for himself. Edgar and his sisters were advised to go back to Hungary for their own safety, but on the way their ship was blown far off course by a fierce gale. They spent some time in northern England and then sailed up the coast to the Firth of Forth in Scotland, where King Malcolm gave them a warm welcome to his kingdom.

Margaret was now about twenty years old; Malcolm was forty, and unmarried, and he soon became attracted to her. But she took a lot of persuading because she herself wanted to become a Benedictine nun, and besides which Malcolm had a very stormy temperament! It was only after a very long time of reflection that she finally agreed to marry him, and their wedding took place in the year 1070, when she was twenty-three. In the end, although she was much younger than him, she was the one who changed him; under her influence, he became a much wiser and godlier king.

Of course, Margaret was now in a high position in Scottish society, and was very wealthy according to the standard of the day. But she continued to live in the spirit of inward poverty. She saw nothing she possessed as belonging to her; everything was to be used for the purposes of God. As Queen, she continued to live the ordered life of prayer and work that she had learned from the Benedictines. In a very male-dominated society she was only the wife of the king, but nevertheless, mainly because of her husband’s deep devotion and respect for her, and because of her own personal integrity, she came to have the leading voice in making changes that affected the social and spiritual life of Scotland.

Margaret would begin each day with a prolonged time of prayer, especially singing the psalms. In this she was following the example of the Benedictine nuns; the Rule of St. Benedict prescribes seven prayer services a day, and in this way the whole book of one hundred and fifty psalms would be prayed through once a week!

After her prayer time, we’re told that orphaned children would be brought to her, and she would prepare their food herself and serve it to them. It also became the custom that any destitute, poor people would come every morning to the royal hall; when they were seated around it, the King and Queen would enter and ‘serve Christ in the person of his poor’. Before they did this, it was their custom to send out of the room all other spectators except for the chaplains and a few attendants because it was important to Margaret that what they did was done for the love of God and the poor, not to win spiritual brownie points from admiring onlookers.

The church in Scotland had been formed in the Celtic way of Christianity. But Margaret had been raised in the way of Rome, and she was keen to bring Scotland into unity with the rest of the world. However, she didn’t do it in a domineering or authoritarian way. She often visited the Celtic hermits in their lonely cells, offering them gifts and caring for their churches. But she also held many conferences with the leaders of the Church, putting forward the Roman point of view about things like the date of Lent and the proper customs for celebrating the liturgy and so on. In the end she convinced them—not so much because of the strength of her arguments, but by the power of her holy life.

In those days many people in Scotland used to go on pilgrimages to see the relics of St. Andrew at the place now called ‘St. Andrew’s’. Margaret wanted to help the pilgrims, so she had little houses built on either shore of the sea that divided Lothian from Scotland, so that poor people and pilgrims could shelter there and rest after their journeys. She also provided ships to transport them across the water. And interestingly enough, that place in eastern Scotland is still called ‘Queensferry’!

I think it’s fair to say that most people from the past who are recognised as saints were monks and nuns who lived lives of celibacy, far removed from the demands of the world and the pressures of family life. But Margaret is remembered as having a happy family life. She had eight children—six sons and two daughters and her three youngest, Edgar, Alexander, and David, are remembered as among the best kings Scotland has ever had.

I love hearing about the lives of the saints, not just because of their intrinsic value as stories about people who have gone before us in our lives of faith, but because there is always something we can take, reflect on and use to shape our own lives as followers of Jesus.

Like Margaret, we’re all busy people. Many of us work long hours at demanding jobs. Some of us are retired of course, but so many times I hear retirees claiming they’ve never been so busy and wondering how they had time to work!

So, how are we to avoid becoming burnt out? Where can we find strength from God to deal with the everyday challenges that life sends our way?

Surely our answer as Christians is that we need to stay in touch with God so that we come to know his presence in our daily lives – God loves us and wants each of us to experience his love. One of the best ways of staying in touch with him is prayer. In prayer, we can lay down our burdens in God’s presence. We can bring our requests—for others and ourselves—to the one who’s best able to deal with them. We can thank God for the blessings we receive and ask God’s forgiveness for our wrongdoings and shortcomings. We can listen to the voice of God in Scripture and in silence and seek a word from God to guide us through our day.

Now praying seven times a day, as Margaret did, might be a bit much for some of us! But maybe we could manage once or twice? Perhaps at the beginning and end of the day, we can turn to God for strength and peace.

‘Love God with all your heart and love your neighbour as yourself’.

Jesus’ vision is a life of loving relationship with God and our neighbour. Many of us are getting better at doing a lot to help our neighbour, but my friends,  let’s not forget about our relationship with God. Margaret of Scotland was a very busy person, but she never forgot her daily time with God in prayer. Let’s follow her example, and be people of prayer as well as people of good deeds. The two belong together, and when we combine them, like St Margaret, we’ll find richness in the life for which we were made.

I wonder if you have ever played that game where you try to remember objects on a tray? A feat of memory! Memory yes, but not really remembering. If you have ever played this game, I bet you are now remembering it. The fun, the laughter, the people you played it with. This is Remembering. Mentally and emotionally placing yourself back into a moment.

Remembering thoughts, feelings, smells, relationships. The difference between memory and remembering. One is simple factual recall, the other forms us as human beings.

Remembering connects us individually and collectively: telling us who we are, where we come from, and linking us to our community, our friends, and our families.  

The loss of life in the Great War was dramatic, traumatic, and affected every community across our country and beyond. After the Armistice in 1918, many didn’t talk about it for years, but collectively the nation needed to remember.

The trauma and loss of life were so significant that remembering became vital. Not simply recalling a list of battles fought and campaigns won or lost, but a re-membering, of people, of lives, of relationships. The importance of lost individuals as members of the community.

Remembering each individual within a collective remembering of millions. Because those who died had value, they had innate worth. For all it is the overwhelming numbers we recall in history books, grief was for the individual.

So why do we still fall silent? In 2014 I went to see the Sea of Poppies Installation at the Tower of London. I eavesdropped on the crowds’ conversations and many of them were remembering a specific family member. A family member of whom they have no ‘memory’ and yet, re-membering was still important. 100 years later a Great Niece or a Great Grandson was there, moved to tears. A treasured moment, not because of memory, but because that individual mattered within their family story. It is through remembering that generations and their stories interweave and matter. Sadly, this ‘war to end all wars’ did not end conflicts, so we also remember many who have died in conflicts since. Generations past, and indeed present, whose stories of war and its impact are remembered.

When we are in despair, we can feel that God has forgotten us. That we have been abandoned. Even Jesus on the Cross shouted out ‘My God, my God, why have you Forsaken me?’ (Mark 15.34b).

This heartfelt cry of the deep human fear of being forgotten certainly found an echo in the trenches of the First World War, and for many who have known armed conflict. The Old testament prophet, Isaiah speaks into this space. ‘Can a mother forget the babe at her breast, and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you. See I have engraved you on the palms of my hands’ (Isaiah 49: 15-16).

In the middle of desolation, forsakenness, the isolation of being forgotten, it is being remembered which gives us back our humanity, evidenced on the engraved palms of God. Remembering is a human action that helps us to feel valued. God tells us that remembering is even more a divine action that gives value to humanity.

Today is our opportunity to remember and grieve personally and collectively for the individuals from our community. Giving back our humanity in the worst of circumstances. God tells us that we matter more to him than a baby does to its mother, that remembering us is a divine action that gives value to humanity, that he is prepared to sacrifice himself for us.

Today we remember those who have also followed that command; that greater love hath no one than this, that they lay down their life for their friends. We, their friends, will remember them, and their innate worth as human beings, both to us and to God.

Is it easy to be a Saint? I wonder if any of us could do it?

Take St Notburga – could you do what she did? She was a cook in the household of Henry and Ottilia of Rattenberg, living in the Tyrol around the turn of the fourteenth century. She was so devout that she would give the leftovers to the poor rather than to pigs as Ottilia had commanded her to do. One day Henry became suspicious of her and ordered that a bag she was carrying when she was leaving the cast should be searched. Miraculously the leftover food in the bag had turned into sawdust, but nevertheless she was sacked by Ottilia anyway. Would you risk losing your job to do the right thing?

Or could you be like St Marcella. She was a high born roman noble woman who converted Christianity at the end of the fourth century. Following the death of her husband, she was pursued by a number of wealthy influential suitors, but turned them all down and gave away her entire fortune to the poor before committing herself to an austere life in the service of Christ. Could you give away everything you have and forsake your closest relationships for your faith?

Or how about St Richard Gwyn of Wrexham. He was a catholic at the time of the reformation and was threatened with ghastliness if he did not conform to the Church of England. He took to making up rude, comic songs about the vicar for which he was clapped in irons. He then rattled his chains during sermons which so annoyed everyone that he was convicted of high treason and was hung, drawn and quartered in Wrexham’s beast market. Whether you agreed with St Richard or not, could you stand up so strongly for what you thought was right?

Most Episcopalians are familiar with the church year: that great cycle of prayer and liturgy that takes us from Advent, through Christmas and Epiphany, on to Lent and Easter, and into the long stretch of Sundays after Pentecost. Fewer among us might be familiar with the cycle of the saints’ calendar. While most of the saints and great lights of the Church have a special feast day or celebration assigned to them, it is rare that they get a mention in church on Sundays for the simple reason that the assigned Sunday liturgy nearly always takes precedence, though here in East Sutherland we have had a few saints days kept on a Sunday when permissible – some of you might recall that we remembered St Bartholomew back in August, and later this month we’ll learn more about St Margaret of Scotland. But as I said, there aren’t many Sundays where we are able to ‘keep’ the particular saint’s day.

It is, in some ways, a pity, because there is always much we can learn from the lives of the saints. Some were great scholars; others were illiterate. Some were ancient; others modern. But what is particularly striking about the calendar of the saints is that it is a bit of hodge-podge – messy and unpredictable. In the calendar of the blessed, saints come and go in no particular order. Ninth-century saint follows twentieth; European, Far East; young, old; and so on.

Just this month, for instance, ancient Willibrord, whose feast is kept on the seventh of November, hobnobs with Reformation-era, Richard Hooker, of November third, and medieval Hugh of Lincoln, of November seventeenth. It must make for some very interesting conversations in high places.

The calendar of the saints mirrors our own lives in many ways. People come to us in no particular order. We probably did not choose the particular members of our church community, for example. Friends and future spouses appear seemingly out of nowhere, and we do not get to choose the people without whom we would not be here: our own parents.

Those described as blessed, or saints, in our gospel text today are also a pretty diverse range of characters,  perhaps an unfortunate and desperate one. They are not particularly popular, or well-off, or prosperous. They are the poor, the hungry, the weeping, and the despised. If they have anything in common, it is perhaps that they are those people who are not in control of things. They are those who are often described as ‘victims’ or ‘vulnerable’.

I’m not sure that there are many of us, including martyrs and saints, who actively want to be victimised, used, manipulated, cheated, or made to look a fool. And certainly, our scriptures do not require that of us. We read the daily papers and we shake our heads as we learn about all the evil things our fellow human beings are capable of, including the shedding of innocent blood. I imagine that we certainly do not want such things to happen to us – no matter how committed we are to the Gospel.

But somewhere in our fear of being hurt or made a victim we may, if we are not careful, also lose our ability to be vulnerable; to take a chance on another human being, on life, on God. Because if we dare to open ourselves to others it is quite possible, some might say likely, that we will get hurt. But, you know, unless we are willing to take that risk, we may find ourselves living lives of fear and loneliness -in other words, lives that can be devoid of human warmth and caring and love.

So, the saints do have something in common, in spite of their variety and age and culture. They have learned to become vulnerable, to be fully human, and to take chances on others, even when it may seem to go against common sense or their own self-interest. And like it or not, each of us will also be given plenty of opportunity to experience this vulnerability in our own lives – at work, at home, among friends, and sometimes at church as well.

So what about being blessed? What about being a saint? We can determine our state of saintliness and blessing by our willingness to be open to the needs of others. Sainthood becomes not so much some unattainable goal of moral excellence as it does a way of life marked by commitment to others and their needs.

We will not always be good. We will not always get it right first time. We will fail. We will have plenty of reasons to witness and to accept our own vulnerability. But then we are in good company. After all, what words other than ‘vulnerable’ and ‘committed’ should we use to describe a God willing to become one of us with all the messiness of our self-doubts, and strings of failures, and hurts, and even death?

It probably does not take much effort to be poor, grief-stricken, or hungry. But being blessed – well that is something else. That involves a radically different way of seeing the world. It requires a worldview that embraces the poor, and the exiled, and the remnant, and the refugee. Not just because our Lord asks us to do this in the gospel, but because we should recognise ourselves in the very least of those we know. We should recognise that our saintliness and blessing comes only in embracing wholeheartedly and without reservation all those others in need of God’s blessing.

Is it easy being a saint? I am afraid it is more difficult than we ever thought. Difficult, that is, if we try to do it through our own power and with our own wisdom and cleverness and effort. But it is paradoxically easy when we hold on to the blessed cross of Christ that forever committed God to the world; the cross that consecrates us in the blood of the Lamb, who gave himself that we might live. Blessed be God in all His saints, both living and departed!